The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Huddie Ledbetter, better known by the prison moniker Lead Belly, was a musical genius born in the southern United States just as Jim Crow laws were starting to bite. He fell foul of an unapologetically racist legal system and ended up serving on a chain gang in 1915, later doing time in state penitentiaries in
In 1993 Vernor Vinge popularised the notion of the Singularity – the point at which exponentially accelerating trends in multiple technologies move out of control in an endless positive feedback loop. Vinge was a science fiction writer; Ray Kurzweil is not. In 1993 he had already pioneered optical character recognition and synthesisers that could precisely
Richard Sudell is the forgotten hero of the gardening revolution in Britain between the first and second world wars. A Quaker, born in Lancashire in 1892, the son of a straw and hay dealer, he left school at 14 and became a gardener, worked at Kew, then went to prison as a conscientious objector in
‘Write and record’ was the dying instruction of the historian Simon Dubnow – shot by Nazis in the Riga ghetto – and two books recently emerging from Ukraine embody this spirit in spades. Now that the world’s anger and sympathies have largely moved on to the Middle East, they may do something to rekindle that
The modern Olympics, first held in Athens in 1896 in a genuflection to their Grecian predecessors, was the creation of Pierre de Coubertin, a French aristocrat. As this septet of books shows from allusive angles, Coubertin’s best known quotation – ‘the most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part’ –
The wife of the Victorian photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot called his first cameras ‘mousetraps’: little wooden boxes that were designed to capture anything placed before them. Yet most of Fox Talbot’s earliest photographs do not show living bodies at all. Long exposure times meant that the faintest twitch on a sitter’s face would dissolve
‘Let me leave Cairn here as a trail marker, a moment noted, a view from the strange here-and-now,’ Kathleen Jamie states towards the end of the prologue to her exquisite new collection of writings. In more than 40 micro-essays and poems, her keen-eyed view encompasses both an uninhabited island far out at sea and a
Most days, outside the local courtroom where I live in Finchley Central, a man holds up a placard that says in big black capitals: ALL OUR BRAINS ARE MICROCHIPPED BY THE SECURITY SERVICES. It’s a foolish conspiracy theory, of course, but it’s also a symptom of the fear and loathing of the state which has
‘Spies, you are lights in state, but of base stuff,/ Who, when you’ve burnt yourselves down to the snuff,/ Stink, and are thrown away.’ Ben Jonson likened his fellow secret agents to a tallow candle: a grotty necessity, to be discarded without regret. Who now remembers Arthur Gregory, and his ‘admirable art of forcing the
Fleishman is in Trouble was one of the funniest novels of 2020, and it catapulted Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a New York Times journalist, into the spotlight with a US TV series two years later. Long Island Compromise is a rollicking family saga written with the same sardonic wit. It is centred around a wealthy family living
There has been a spate of books recently about private education, ranging from academic denouncements of their malign effects on society, such as Francis Green and David Kynaston’s Engines of Privilege, to Charles Spencer’s grim chronicle of neglect and abuse, A Very Private School. Though technically falling within this genre, 1967, the singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock’s
It is well established that women are happy to read novels written by men but that male readers rarely extend a reciprocal courtesy. The late Mo Hayder is a case in point, since despite the extraordinary sales of the novels she wrote before her premature death in 2021, her fan base remains overwhelmingly female. It
‘Is it because we see our world only darkly that we surround ourselves with lies we call time, history, reality, memory, detail, facts?’ Richard Flanagan’s memoir opens at the Ohama coal mine in Japan, once home to his father and a host of other POW slave labourers. It then spirals outwards via his childhood (in
They came on a small, crowded, leaky boat from Calais towards Dover in seas that could turn from placid to treacherous in an instant, around 30 people seeking sanctuary from persecution, unsure of the welcome they would receive. ‘We were seized by horrible vomitings and most of the party became so dreadfully ill they thought
In 1876, writing to his friend Gertrude Tennant, Gustave Flaubert set down a principle that artists and writers should live by: Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d’être violent et original dans vos œuvres. (Be regular in your life and ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and
The question ‘Was Shakespeare gay?’ is not very rational. It might be a little like asking ‘Was Shakespeare a Tory?’. Some of his scenarios might coincide with later developments – Jaques trying to pick up Ganymede in As You Like It (gay), or Ulysses’s speech on degree in Troilus and Cressida (Tory). But the historical
The year is 1993 and 16-year-old Tommo has been moved from a day state school of 2,000 pupils in brown blazers that ‘when it rained… smelled of shit’ to Eskmount, an elite Scottish boarding school, where boys wear kilts and put their ‘cocks on your shoulder’ when you’re working in the library (easier in a
In our godless, post-industrial, hyper-competitive world, rest is seen merely as recuperation: it’s when we man-machines ‘recharge our batteries’, as the cliché goes, before dashing back to the factory or work-station. It’s a negative concept. You rest for a reason, which is to avoid burnout. All you should really do to be happy is read
In February 1985 I had the good fortune to be a guest in Hong Kong at the Mandarin hotel’s 21st birthday celebration, a lavish three-day reconstruction of the sort of imperial banquet given during the Qing dynasty by the Kangxi emperor (1654-1722) and his grandson the Qianlong emperor (1711-1799). Kangxi started the custom of banqueting
Imagine: it’s 16 December 2004 and you are a middle-ranking banker living in Moscow – prosperous but ordinary, a long way below oligarch level. You are looking forward to a New Year’s trip with your family to Prague – the hotel is booked; your young son is excited. Your phone rings while you are at
From the eastern Atlantic, the US looks boringly uniform. Yet Alaska is almost as different from Alabama as Turku is from Turkey. If you travel the length of the Mississippi, food, laws, customs and lingo change as surprisingly as along the Danube. Particularism is rife. In two counties in Vermont, there are warrants for the
Kapka Kassabova is celebrated for her poetic accounts of rural communities dwelling at the margins of modernity, but also along a border zone in the southern extremity of her native Bulgaria. In her previous book, Elixir, her chosen people were the Muslim Pomaks of the Rhodope Mountains, with their ancient herbalist traditions. In Anima, she
In September 1978 Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian émigré writer, waited at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge on his way to work at the BBC World Service. Feeling a sting in his right thigh, he looked round to see the man behind him picking up his apparently fallen umbrella. The man apologised in a foreign
In the arctic borderlands in the 1800s Finns and Swedes have come to live among the Sami. Missionaries and traders, they have brought alcohol and Protestant teaching. ‘Mad Lasse’ is what the locals call the preacher, and mostly they keep their distance, staying with their reindeer out on the tundra, following their ancient customs. Some,
Whatever happened to the likely lads and lasses of the East London art scene at the high noon of Cool Britannia? Hari Kunzru’s seventh novel, Blue Ruin, loads much else on to its ideas-rich plate – not least a pandemic yarn set in the panic-stricken spring of 2020. At its core, however, his plot traces
Shetland comprises an archipelago of some 300 islands and skerries situated roughly half way between London and the Arctic Circle. Stereotyped by many outsiders as bleak and somehow ‘on the edge’, according to the poet Jen Hadfield’s stylish memoir – about her 17 years of living there – it can be more illuminating to see
The Tory era is not (quite) over yet, but already the obituaries are in. In particular, two new books from Torsten Bell and Paul Collier seek to bury not just Rishi Sunak and his cabinet but the whole economic approach that the Conservatives have taken since 2010, or perhaps even 1979. Let’s start with Bell
Were trains to blame for the travel writing boom of the 1980s? When Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar was published in 1975, it sold 1.5 million copies and launched a publishing phenomenon. At first, long-distance train journeys conjured all the romance of the golden age of travel: leather luggage, first-class compartments and the billowing
Contemporary Irish writers have a knack of making their recent past feel very foreign. Clare Keegan’s Small Things Like These is set in 1985, but the horrors she reveals about one of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries seem more like ancient history. Alan Murrin pulls off something similar in The Coast Road, where in late 1994 divorce